Re: MTRR setup in OVMF [was: PATCH v3 01/10 KVM: MMU: fix decoding cache type from MTRR]

Laszlo Ersek
2015-07-15T19:41:15Z

On 07/15/15 21:30, Xiao Guangrong wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have posted the pachset to make OVMF happy and have CCed you guys,
> could you please check it if it works for you?

Sorry, I can't check it; I don't have an environment that exposes the
issue in the first place. Perhaps Alex can check it, or refer some of
the users that reported the problem to him to this patchset? (Those
users were using bleeding edge v4.2-rc1 anyway, unlike conservative me.)

Thanks!
Laszlo

> On 07/15/2015 05:15 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>>> The long delay that Alex reported (for the case when all guest memory
>>> was set to UC up-front) is due to the fact that the SEC phase of OVMF
>>> decompresses an approximately 1712 KB sized, LZMA-compressed blob, to
>>> approx. 896 KB worth of PEI drivers and 8192 KB worth of DXE and UEFI
>>> drivers -- and this decompression is extremely memory-intensive.
>>>
>>> (When Jordan implemented that reset vector first, we saw similar
>>> performance degradation on AMD hosts (albeit not due to MTRR but due to
>>> page attributes). See
>>> <https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/commit/98f378a7>. I'm only mentioning
>>> it here because it makes me appreciate the current problem report.)
>>>
>>> Anyway, the reset vector's page table building is implemented in
>>> "OvmfPkg/ResetVector/Ia32/PageTables64.asm". The decompression in SEC
>>> can be found in "OvmfPkg/Sec/SecMain.c", function DecompressMemFvs().
>>
>> Perhaps the OVMF reset vector should initialize the MTRRs for the BSP?
>> I think SEC doesn't do any MMIO, so it should be enough to enable MTRRs
>> and set the default type to writeback.
>>
>> In any case we're going to have to quirk it, because of the broken
>> guests in the wild.
>>
>> Paolo
>>